Browning’s confession in La Saisias that the sorrow of his life outweighed its joy is not inconsistent with his habitual cheerfulness of manner.  Such estimates as this are little to be trusted.  One great shock of pain may stand for ever aloof from all other experiences; the pleasant sensations of many days pass from our memory.  We cannot tell.  But that Browning supposed himself able to tell is in itself worthy of note.  In The Two Poets of Croisic, which was written in London immediately after La Saisiaz, and which, though of little intrinsic importance, shows that Browning was capable of a certain grace in verse that is light, he pleads that the power of victoriously dealing with pain and transforming it into strength may be taken as the test of a poet’s greatness: 

     Yoke Hatred, Crime, Remorse,
    Despair:  but ever ’mid the whirling fear,
    Let, through the tumult, break the poet’s face
    Radiant, assured his wild slaves win the race.

This is good counsel for art; but not wholly wise counsel for life.  Sorrow, indeed, is not wronged by a cheerfulness cultivated and strenuously maintained; but gladness does suffer a certain wrong.  Sunshine comes and goes; the attempt to substitute any unrelieved light for sunshine is somewhat of a failure at the best.  Shadows and brightness pursuing each other according to the course of nature make more for genuine happiness than does any stream of moral electricity worked from a dynamo of the will.  It is pleasanter to encounter a breeze that sinks and swells, that lingers and hastens, than to face a vigorous and sustained gale even of a tonic quality.  Browning’s unfailing cheer and cordiality of manner were admirable; they were in part spontaneous, in part an acceptance of duty, in part a mode of self-protection; they were only less excellent than the varying moods of a simple and beautiful nature.

When La Saisiaz appeared Browning was sixty-six years old.  He lived for more than eleven years longer, during which period he published six volumes of verse, showing new powers as a writer of brief poetic narrative and as a teacher through parables; but he produced no single work of prolonged and sustained effort—­which perhaps was well.  His physical vigour continued for long unabated.  He still enjoyed the various pleasures and excitements of the London season; but it is noted by Mrs Orr that after the death of Miss Egerton-Smith he “almost mechanically renounced all the musical entertainments to which she had so regularly accompanied him.”  His daily habits were of the utmost regularity, varying hardly at all from week to week.  He was averse, says Mrs Orr, “to every hought of change,” and chose rather to adapt himself to external conditions than to enter on the effort of altering them; “what he had done once he was wont, for that very reason, to continue doing.”  A few days after Browning’s death a journalist obtained from a photographer, Mr